Europe sets sight on Venus

A European mission to Venus that it is hoped will provide fresh insights into the long term development of global warming on Earth has been given the all-clear for lift off next week.

European Voice

11/2/05, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 12:03 PM CET

After an abortive launch on 26 October, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Venus Express Mission is now expected to take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday 9 November.

The mission had been delayed because of the discovery of contamination in the launch vehicle, a Russia Soyuz-Fregat rocket.

An ESA spokesperson said that the agency was confident the mission could now go ahead. “That is the working date which is made by the launch provider,” she said.

Because of planetary alignments the mission has a launch window between 26 October and 25 November.

If all goes well next Wednesday, after 162 days in space the Venus Express will enter Venusian gravity starting its main work of examining the planet’s atmosphere in April 2006.

Using infrared technology developed in the last decade, the agency hopes Venus Express will provide enough information to create the first ever three-dimensional model of Venus’s atmosphere, giving an insight into advanced greenhouse effects.

“Venus is very hot and dusty,” explains Doctor HŒkan Svedhem, a project scientist working on the mission. “Its atmosphere contains a lot of carbon dioxide so solar radiation can go down to the surface but it cannot escape out.”

With surface temperatures of almost 500¡C, some say Venus represents a picture of what the Earth could be like in the very advanced stages of the greenhouse effect.

“We hope to understand how the atmosphere of Venus has evolved and to extrapolate from that how it might evolve in the future,” said Svedhem.

“We think that the Earth and Venus were originally very similar and it is not clear why they are so different today.”

Scientists say both planets are of a similar size and chemical composition and both are thought to have been created at around the same time, some 4.6 billion years ago. Svedhem hopes the information collected by Venus Express will help make scientific models of the effects of the Earth’s greenhouse effect more robust.

“It will give us a better idea of the rate at which the greenhouse effect could increase or decrease on earth,” he said.